Sony is launching its first Xperia phone after splitting with Ericsson sooner than we would have thought.
Or at least that’s the estimation of online retailer Clove, who have put up a price and release date for the new Ericsson-less blower. The Xperia S will cost you £468 sim-free and Clove reckons its initial batch of stock will be arriving in the first week of March. So we don’t have much longer than a month to wait to find out what direction Sony is taking with the Xperia range since striking out on its own.
The phone has a transparent element along the base of the unit, and looks rather nifty on the whole. The tech spec doesn’t disappoint either, with one of the highlights being a 12 megapixel camera with an Exmor R lens which should make for some pretty impressive mobile photography. Clove notes the quick time to boot up the camera, and says that this is the best snapper seen in a smartphone to date, even outdoing the Nokia N8 it would seem.
Other specs include a 4.3 inch LED backlit “reality display” with a resolution of 1280×720, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, and a generous 32GB of storage on board. There’s also a micro-HDMI port to hook the device up to the TV for streaming 720p video directly to the big screen. NFC is on board, too. Given the spec, the price point looks reasonably competitive, and hopefully the networks will have some good contract deals on offer. Sony certainly needs this phone to succeed in the face of stiff Android competition from Samsung and HTC. Perhaps the only weak point of the Xperia S is that it will ship with Gingerbread, however an update to Ice Cream Sandwich is promised at some point in the second quarter.